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The blog's been on hiatus during this holiday week, but I've recently noticed that I've been at this for just over a year now. I can't say I expected to be doing this for so long, but I also can't say I expected to enjoy it as much as I have.
Expect another entry early next week.
Michel's post over at P2P Foundation today pointed me to Kenneth Rufo's critique of a binary view of social interaction in digital media environments: "...the assumption is that the virtual connections of the digital world either replace or compliment the connections in the real world. ... Neither is correct; the virtual is a supplement in the Derridean sense, in that it takes the form of an addition, but ends up reconfiguring the original to which it has been added." Even more intriguingly he promises further analysis in a future post, questioning the real/virtual binary from the perspectives of Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Derrida. Needless to say, I'm quite interested to read this.
I would like to throw one more view into the mix here, one that does not rely on a real/virtual distinction. It's important to move away from this binary as it becomes clear that the boundaries between digital and physical selves are becoming quite thin and porous. An good way to view digital interaction and socialization is through the lens provided by Hardt and Negri in Empire and Multitude - as a form of immaterial labor. While Hardt and Negri write about immaterial labor in a much more expansive application, I think applying this same perspective to social networks demonstrates the political, cultural, and social roles of these media.
Immaterial labor is that which produces affect, knowledge, ideas, etc. as opposed to physical goods. While this form of labor is, in some ways, the post-outsourcing American vision, it also occurs on much lower, light-weight levels through real-world networks. Yet these smaller levels of production are far from insignificant, their networks forming H&N's concept of a new biopolitical conception of social subjects: the multitude. We can look at web-based social networks as metonymous in relation to the larger phenomena (albeit an elite, monied metonym). If web-based social networks are networks of immaterial labor, then their product is a multiple, swarming subjectivity.
Instead of viewing these media as surrogates or complements for real-world interaction, we can see them as increasingly organic prostheses of interaction that aid and demonstrate the production of a new subjectivity that trancends both the crowd and the individual.
I've just seen the web version of a piece by the British new media artist Stanza called "YOU ARE MY SUBJECTS". The piece addresses a familiar topic in new media art - surveillance - especially as is operates through the ubiquitous British CCTV system. While in the gallery, YAMS is meant to be displayed on three large screens in London with the imagery originating in New York. On the web, the viewer is limited to a single image frame with multiple simultaneous audio tracks. The image itself is sensitive to the position of the viewer's cursor in relation to the frame, displaying a series of blurred and distorted still images that only come into focus when the cursor comes to a stop.
In creating a piece meant to critique surveillance through closed circuit television, Stanza has managed to integrate only a thin illusion of liveness and avoid almost completely the specificity of CCTV. Yet, I don't mention this as negative criticism, but to point out that the stated goal of the piece (revealing a state surveillance apparatus) is not necessarily the effect, intended or not.
First of all, it's key to note that a large portion of YAMS viewers will not be in the gallery, but on their computers viewing it in their web browser - like me. This contrasts with the idea that the piece addresses CCTV as a specific medium of surveillance. Stanza has opened the illusion of surveillance to any who choose to access it, essentially feeding not only a desire to see without being seen, but also the parallel desire to be seen that we see so often in new media. The images are vague enough to imply liveness and immediacy without actually breaching those boundaries. This allows the viewer to place him/herself on both sides of the screen. We are, in a sense, viewing ourselves as much as others.
YAMS does indeed tackle surveillance, though not in the subversive manner it seems to want to. Instead of revealing a grim reality of the modern state, it undermines its outlying purpose and allows an outlet for the fulfillment of scopic desires that we see in action in so many places on the web these days (do I even need to mention them here anymore?).
I've been sick all week and haven't been able to muster up the energy to write much of anything, but in the interest of not ignoring the blog, I will point out a new site/service which seems very interesting.
Like many of the people who probably read this blog, I read about Swivel on TechCrunch the other day. I haven't fully explored it yet, but it claims essentially to be a social data-sharing service. The reason I think this is important is that it brings social-networking down to its bare functionality - and it's surprisingly useful.
Any online social network is essentially concerned with the aggregation and comparison of data and metadata. Facebook wants no more than to collect the data of every college student in the form of pictures and text, del.icio.us collects the data of a user's affinity, thoughts, and tags for a site, and so on. It seem that what Swivel now allows is a way to take less aesthetically pleasing data (candy sales in 2004 for instance) and place it into an archival and socally-driven network.
On one hand I can see this becoming useful for teachers as a way to aggregate data from class-work in a way that students might enjoy, but I more see this as an example of the over-all direction of social media. That is, the direction toward a more all-emcompassing data (of all sorts) archivization and socialization.